Auntie Beeb Knows Best: Songs Banned by the BBC

Please visit the source of this image for an excellent blog about censorship.

BBC4 recently broadcast a documentary about BBC censorship, Britain’s Most Dangerous Songs: Listen to the Banned. All in our own best interests, of course, as a kindly moral guardian. Looking back with hindsight, their reasons now seem a little threadbare, tending towards the maintenance of the social and political status quo. Here’s a full list of songs banned by the BBC.

This isn’t a review, but I do want to post videos of the songs that interest me most.

I’ve always liked George Formby, a serial offender in the 1930s with his cheeky innuendo, outrageous double-entendres and rampant ukelele. Not only did he offend the middle class Home Counties audience catered to by the BBC, he had the audacity to be northern.

Here he is with his Little Stick of Blackpool Rock.

Louis Armstrong’s cover of Mack the Knife, from The Threepenny Opera was banned in 1956 for its portrayal of the serial killer, MacHeath. I actually prefer the film version, but Armstrong’s cover made the song a popular success, and it is good.

I remember seeing the The Shangri-Las on television, with Leader of the Pack, banned in 1965. The song had teenage rebellion, motorbikes, sudden death, against a backdrop of violence between mods and rockers at British seaside resorts – no wonder the BBC hated it.

The BBC were particularly clueless about the songs on Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band, missing the drug references in everything except A Day in the Life, banned in 1967.

And now for something completely different – the Sex Pistol’s vicious assault on the monarchy in the year of the Silver Jubilee, 1977. At least that’s how the BBC saw it.

And finally to the latest furore from April last year when Margaret Thatcher died, her name so reviled in certain parts of the UK that street parties were held to celebrate the event, even while the Establishment gave her a state funeral. I was one of the people cheering.

A media campaign had been planned as early 2007 to send Ding Dong the Witch Is Dead to the top of the pop charts. It succeeded. This time the BBC didn’t ban the song outright. They played only the first 5 seconds.

Here is the clip from the Wizard of Oz.

Television Review: A Very British Murder with Lucy Worsley – The New Taste for Blood (1/3)

BBC4 Website: A Very British Murder with Lucy Worsley
Lucy Worsley’s Website

Huzzah! Dr Worsley has a new documentary on the British fascination with gory murders and the culture in which the fascination flourished. She gives us three real murder cases from the first half of the 19th century. The first are the 1811 Ratcliff Highway Murders in Wapping, London, with seven victims. Then in 1827, the Red Barn Murder in Polstead, Suffolk, where Maria Marten was foully done to death by her lover. Finally, in 1849, the splendidly named Bermondsey Horror, in which Maria Manning murdered her wealthy lover, double-crossed her complicit husband, and ran off with the stolen loot.

Other television presenters orate while striding across iconic landscapes, or strike thoughtful academic attitudes against the sky. You know they’re posing and it looks silly. Not Lucy Worsley. She dives into the material and gets involved in the nitty-gritty. And how. She visits the crime scenes, handles the artefacts (the skin off the back of a murderer’s head), investigates exactly how the murderers were executed, and makes you feel like a privileged fly on the wall of a morgue.

In this episode she also took the part of Maria Marten in a recreation of a contemporary melodrama, operated and voiced her killer in the marionette theatre version, sang a folk song about the dreadful crime, and acted out the trial of Maria Manning as the lawyers, judge, and of course, Maria Manning herself. Yes, all of them.

If that was all, it would be brilliant entertainment, but there’s much more. She explores the social context of the murders and the shock they created. In 1810 there were only 15 murder convictions, and no real police force. Public anger at the ineffectiveness of the authorities led to reform, so that by 1849 there were uniformed police and a handful of detectives. The police used the new-fangled telegraph to send descriptions of the Mannings to Edinburgh and Jersey, which led to their arrest.

But main story is the development of murder as a gripping morality tale for the edification and entertainment of an increasingly literate population. Thomas De Quincey was the first respectable observer (opium, indeed all drugs, were legal then) to notice the phenomenom and its effects. Villagers in Grasmere, where he lived at Dove Cottage, went to extraordinary lengths to safeguard their homes after hearing about the slaughter of the Marr family in Wapping. Despite the fact that it’s 300 miles away. De Quincey wrote a satire on the public’s fascination, On Murder Considered as one of the Fine Arts, in 1827.

Apart from De Quincey, ballads and broadsides, puppet shows and melodramas, carried the news to avid ears, creating huge public interest in the trials and executions of the murderers. John Williams, suspect in the Ratcliff Highway murders, hanged himself in jail. Thwarted of a spectacle, the authorities carried his body by cart to the Marr’s house, where someone wrenched his head around so it was looking at the scene of his putative crime.

The executions of William Corder (Maria Marten’s killer) and the Mannings were both public, as was usual for the time. But they really pushed out the boat for the Mannings, carrying out the execution on the roof of the jail, so everyone could see. Charles Dickens booked a room with a view and held a party, while still lecturing the hoi polloi for their gloating enthusiasm.

The delicious frisson that earned the Mannings their 5 star execution may well have been due to Maria’s demonstration that a woman could be every bit as ruthless and devious as a man.

This episode was the groundwork, so to speak. The next one looks at how crime, science, and detection affected the culture of homicide in the Victorian Age. This is classic Worsley, and I am in Seventh Heaven.

Best Search Engine Term of the Day

Goes to… lucy worsley’s arse.

Hopefully this inquiry led to a review last year of the lovely Dr Worsley’s documentary on the roles played by women in the 17th century: Harlots, Housewives & Heroines: A 17th Century History for Girls. In 3 parts, with links to the following 2 episodes.

TED Talks: Elaine Morgan says we evolved from aquatic apes

An occasional post featuring talks by innovative thinkers, sponsored by TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design). The internet is made for this – to allow challenging ideas to escape from their academic ghettos and hang out in a place where they can talk to each other.

Elaine Morgan is the most well-known proponent of the aquatic ape hypothesis, which says that our ape ancestors didn’t come down from the trees and suffer in the hot, dry savannah. Sensible beasts that they were, they headed for the beach to take advantage of the plentiful food supplies available in an aquatic environment. Hence us, hairless, intelligent, bipedal apes who have sex face to face. Most of the time, anyway. There’s a lot more to the hypothesis, obviously, and Morgan lays it out in this entertaining talk.

Thanks to the Guardian for reminding me. It has an article prompted by a major London conference next week, and the support of David Attenborough. If you’re interested in the subject, here’s Elaine Morgan giving a lecture at UCL: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4.

And here is a BBC documentary on the subject. Not great picture quality, but worth watching.

We Are Northern Lights

I saw We Are Northern Lights at the Picture House on Friday. It’s a glorious, moving, funny celebration of Scottish identity, made by ordinary people filming their own lives, and edited into a seamless, flowing documentary by director Nick Higgins and the Northern Lights team. He was there at the Picture House for a Q&A afterwards.

This is Scotland’s “first ever mass participation film project,” in which over 1500 people from all over Scotland were either given video cameras and training, or produced footage on their own cameras, some of them smart phones. For three months in 2012, they filmed around the questions:

What Can You See?
What Do You Wish You Had Seen?
What Would You Like To See?

The result is 300 hours of footage, which had to be edited down to 98 minutes. With so many different voices and film-makers, you’d think the film would be a dog’s breakfast. In fact, it flows really well, and I got an exhilarating sense of the diversity of Scottish life. Scotland itself, the urban and rural landscape, features as an eloquent character in the backdrop to all these voices.

I urge you to see it if you can. Currently it’s on the Highlands & Islands tour until April 27, as well as going toe to toe with Iron Man at Cineworld. Here’s a trailer.

Night Mail

This year is the 50th anniversary of one of the greatest acts of social vandalism ever perpetrated by a government – the Beeching Axe – which closed 55% of stations and 30% of route miles on Britain’s rail network. The excuse was efficiency savings, but the rationale ignored the social costs of small communities cut off from major population centres and each other. Railways were an essential part of the transport infrastructure tying the country together, and it’s not hard to see the hand of the Road Lobby in pushing for its implementation.

So I’m posting Night Mail, the famous 1936 documentary about the train that carried the mail from London to Glasgow, in memory of the great railway network we thoughtlessly destroyed in the interests of political expediency. And in memory of those beautiful steam trains, whose rhythm  pounds through the documentary and is echoed in W. H. Auden’s poem at the end. The combination of film, music, and poetry, evoking all the fragile hopes and fears represented by the letters the Night Mail carried, still chokes me up.

Here’s the full text of Auden’s poem.

Night Mail

I
This is the night mail crossing the Border,
Bringing the cheque and the postal order,

Letters for the rich, letters for the poor,
The shop at the corner, the girl next door.

Pulling up Beattock, a steady climb:
The gradient’s against her, but she’s on time.

Past cotton-grass and moorland boulder
Shovelling white steam over her shoulder,

Snorting noisily as she passes
Silent miles of wind-bent grasses.

Birds turn their heads as she approaches,
Stare from bushes at her blank-faced coaches.

Sheep-dogs cannot turn her course;
They slumber on with paws across.

In the farm she passes no one wakes,
But a jug in a bedroom gently shakes.

II
Dawn freshens, Her climb is done.
Down towards Glasgow she descends,
Towards the steam tugs yelping down a glade of cranes
Towards the fields of apparatus, the furnaces
Set on the dark plain like gigantic chessmen.
All Scotland waits for her:
In dark glens, beside pale-green lochs
Men long for news.

III
Letters of thanks, letters from banks,
Letters of joy from girl and boy,
Receipted bills and invitations
To inspect new stock or to visit relations,
And applications for situations,
And timid lovers’ declarations,
And gossip, gossip from all the nations,
News circumstantial, news financial,
Letters with holiday snaps to enlarge in,
Letters with faces scrawled on the margin,
Letters from uncles, cousins, and aunts,
Letters to Scotland from the South of France,
Letters of condolence to Highlands and Lowlands
Written on paper of every hue,
The pink, the violet, the white and the blue,
The chatty, the catty, the boring, the adoring,
The cold and official and the heart’s outpouring,
Clever, stupid, short and long,
The typed and the printed and the spelt all wrong.

IV
Thousands are still asleep,
Dreaming of terrifying monsters
Or of friendly tea beside the band in Cranston’s or Crawford’s:

Asleep in working Glasgow, asleep in well-set Edinburgh,
Asleep in granite Aberdeen,
They continue their dreams,
But shall wake soon and hope for letters,
And none will hear the postman’s knock
Without a quickening of the heart,
For who can bear to feel himself forgotten?

WH Auden

Joy of Life

Nobody expressed it better than Henri Matisse, particularly in the first painting, Le bonheur de vivre (1906). It’s a secular, sensual Eden, without greed or jealousy. The dancers in the background are reproduced in the second painting, Dance, from 1910.

A documentary about Matisse and his influence on our world.